Laila Lalami

Reading At Risk

Last July, when the NEA issued Reading At Risk, a survey of reading habits in the United States, a tsunami of responses bemoaned the decline of literary culture in the continent. The SF Chronicle has some more commentary on this, by Mark Bauerlein and Carol Jago. The tone is as concerned as in other op-ed pieces dealing with the survey.

While rates differed among groups, all revealed significant decreases — young and old, rich and poor, black and white, college graduates and high school graduates. And not just literary reading suffered. From 1992 to 2002, the rate of Americans reading books of any kind dropped from about 61 percent to 57 percent.

This entry was posted
on Monday, September 13th, 2004 at 12:00 am and is filed under literary life.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.